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Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that when a Delta Airlines flight touched down at Midway International Airport in Chicago, the passengers looked out the window to see the jet surrounded by fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. Health officials came through the door wearing facemasks and other protective gear. As it turns out the bedbugs that infest hotels appear to be the source of red marks on a 50-year old Minnesota woman that prompted health officials to quarantine the jet for fear they were dealing with something much more serious: monkeypox. Lise Sievers called her mother during a layover in Detroit and told her that one of the children she visited and is trying to adopt in Uganda had some pus-filled red bumps and also mentioned she had some small bumps of her own, a rash that she suspected was the handiwork of bedbugs. Those two very different bumps — one with pus, one without — got jumbled up in Siever's mother's mind, and she called a hospital near her Indiana home to ask about treatment for her daughter. 'She told them her daughter is on a flight back from Uganda and has some red bumps which are pussing and what should she do to treat them,' says Roger Sievers. 'She was looking for some general advice.' Health officials feared they were looking for monkeypox, a rare and sometimes fatal disease mostly in found in central and western Africa. After the passengers waited on the plane for a couple of hours, officials brought good news. 'They came back down and told my mom it was bed bug bites and they started releasing people.'"

So, your "privacy" is more important than the risk of carrying a highly contagius and painful disease that could very well require quarantine? Because that's what monkeypox is. I've helped treat people who have it, it spreads quickly as hell, and the enclosed nature of an airplane means that you need to check them out like this.

If you really think that your "privacy" or convenience is more important than the risk of spreading a disease like that to 10, 100 or potentially thousands of people, the world is better off by putting a bullet through your head.

"Hey, I just wanted to ask about treatment for this disease that my potential daughter has in FUCKING UGANDA that I've been exposed to, but I'm not going to really be clear in my mind as to the symptoms, especially after I've already come back to the United States and am walking around in a large metropolitan airport."

This attitude is exactly why the world is going to be horrendously screwed when the next super flu breaks out. Wild overreactions to highly contagious diseases are the only appropriate reactions. Its one thing to queue up and get groped by the TSA to protect us from the terrorist boogeyman, but quite another to be inconvenienced due to a credible possibility that everyone on the plane may need to shortly check into a hospital along with everyone they've had contact with.

Seriously, you guys either need to stop posting his spam as stories or just give him the keys to the store and get out of the way. Why is this even considered for a Slashdot story? There's no News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters angle AT ALL. And that's typical of the spam from Hugh Pickens. You ban other spammers, now do the same for him.

The description is incorrect, possibly because it's written by worthless, status-obsessed docs in shiny western offices, where they rarely encounter it.

It would have been best if they had qualified "Rare" with something like "in the west" or "outside of endemic regions". But textbook descriptions are written by western docs, for the use of western docs, who have enough problems as it is with students/patients who hear hoofbeats and think Zebras.

Another way of looking at this is that three out of ten of the top causes of death worldwide are classes of infectious diseases that can spread from person to person: respiratory infection, diarrhoeal diseases, and tuberculosis. TB, the smallest of the three, kills something like 1.3 million people/year -- probably more in one year than terrorism has killed in all time.

Of course deaths/year isn't the right metric for where we should put our attention and money. The best metric would be *preventable* deaths/year. You're over two hundred times more likely to die from a mistake in hospital care than you are from terrorism, and that's preventable. Infectious diseases are often preventable through hygiene and surveillance. We spend 8.8 billion dollars on the Centers for Disease Control every year, as opposed to 59 billion on Homeland security; which do you think provides the biggest bang for the buck in terms of lives saved?

You don't want to be lackadaisical about a viral pathogen like Monkey Pox that already has the capability (albeit weak) of spreading from human to human because mutation can cause a strain to be more infectious than expected.

The child in Uganda actually has the symptoms of Monkeypox, right? How do we know the mother doesn't have it and just isn't showing it yet? How is this child not going to infect others when he is bought over to America?

It's funny how all Doctors/Lawyers/"OMG I"M CETIFIEdEd PROFESSIONAL"s seem to post as Anonymous cowards. BTW you think a real doctor would show a "nurse" professional courtesy, instead of using the term disparagingly. It leads me to believe that most ACs are just twelve year old trolls.

If there wasn't a threat why were crews brought in, why were they not letting people off the plane? Ask yourself these kind of things before ever posting again. Be sure to log in first.

Humbly I modify a quote from the parent. "There is nothing worse than an Anonymous Coward with initiative and time." Love - AtomicAdam